Midtier management tools register high marks

Product Test and Buyer's Guide This newsletter is sponsored by Arsenal Digital Solutions Automated Off-Site Data Protection for SMBs Would you bet your company on the data saved during your last backup? Statistics show that only 6% of companies suffering a catastrophic data loss will survive beyond two years. And yet many organizations struggle to maintain a regular backup schedule, especially as more and more employees work from remote locations: branch offices, home offices, and while traveling. Join us for a timely, interactive presentation to find out how automated, off-site data protection can help SMBs to meet and overcome their backup, recovery and business continuity challenges. Click here to register today and learn how to protect your mission-critical data! Product Test and Buyer's Guide, 05/15/07 Review: Midtier management tools register high marks By Barry Nance A midsize network ranging from 1,000 to 20,000 nodes exhibits virtually all the same complexities and troubleshooting challenges as a meganetwork with more than 50,000 nodes. Monitoring and management products for midrange networks, therefore, need to measure up to that challenge. Compare Products with Network World's VoIP and Convergence Buyer's Guide From deployable IP-PBX systems to unified messaging, Network World has detailed information on hundreds of products. Side-by-side comparisons along with objective test and review results make it quick and easy to find the solutions that are right for your enterprise. Click here to find out more. The ideal management and monitoring tool efficiently and accurately discovers servers, clients, routers, switches and other devices. It revealingly and helpfully displays a map of the discovered nodes. It faithfully checks for connectivity problems, and it intelligently notices performance problems. It provides alerts via e-mail or pager, and it can alert multiple people until the problem is fixed. In some cases, it can automatically solve a problem by restarting a program, running a script or triggering an external program. It produces useful reports that show the health of your network, measures use of the network and its components over time, and forecasts trends to help you plan the network's future capacities. The ideal monitoring tool is reliable, secure and easy to use. It's a pretty tall order. While we invited more than two dozen vendors to participate in this Clear Choice Test, five vendors stepped up, entering a total of six products. For more on this test, please click here. Check out our one-stop shop for network management product research: Network Management Buyer's Guide.

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Contact the author: Nance runs Network Testing Labs and is the author of Introduction to Networking, 4th edition, and Client/Server LAN Programming. He can be reached at barryn@erols.com. This newsletter is sponsored by Arsenal Digital Solutions Automated Off-Site Data Protection for SMBs Would you bet your company on the data saved during your last backup? Statistics show that only 6% of companies suffering a catastrophic data loss will survive beyond two years. And yet many organizations struggle to maintain a regular backup schedule, especially as more and more employees work from remote locations: branch offices, home offices, and while traveling. Join us for a timely, interactive presentation to find out how automated, off-site data protection can help SMBs to meet and overcome their backup, recovery and business continuity challenges. Click here to register today and learn how to protect your mission-critical data! BONUS FEATURE IT PRODUCT RESEARCH AT YOUR FINGERTIPS Get detailed information on thousands of products, conduct side-by-side comparisons and read product test and review results with Network World’s IT Buyer’s Guides. Find the best solution faster than ever with over 100 distinct categories across the security, storage, management, wireless, infrastructure and convergence markets. Click here for details. PRINT SUBSCRIPTIONS AVAILABLE You've got the technology snapshot of your choice delivered to your inbox each day. Extend your knowledge with a print subscription to the Network World newsweekly, Apply here today. International subscribers, click here. SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES To subscribe or unsubscribe to any Network World newsletter, change your e-mail address or contact us, click here. This message was sent to: security.world@gmail.com. Please use this address when modifying your subscription. Advertising information: Write to Associate Publisher Online Susan Cardoza Network World, Inc., 118 Turnpike Road, Southborough, MA 01772 Copyright Network World, Inc., 2007